This could potentially be quite big for Ubuntu and Linux in general. Canonical and the Chinese government have announced a collaboration to build a version of Ubuntu specifically for the Chinese market, which will become the reference architecture for standard operating systems in the country.

You are somewhat right, applications that are distributed by the distribution and have source code available are packaged in a way that can easily break, not with the kernel program ABI, but with all the supporting libraries themselves. Though, in reality, it does not break because the distribution always updates any application that is about to break by changes made by newer libraries. In return we end up with binaries that are somewhat always compiled with the latest compiler improvements and a very minimal overlap of libraries.

This does not work for commercial applications, so, good packaging by the vendor part is done by statically linking as many libraries as possible, and only relying on system libraries if they have good backwards compatibility. This is somewhat similar to what windows applications tend to do. Admittedly, not all applications do this right, so applications and games might break if they are not updated by the vendor.

Luckly Loki Games had the decency of crating the freaking SDL library that interfaces with most things a game needs, and with a very solid abi/api that is still in use today by new games. The result is that you can run some of their really old games with no trouble in new systems. You still get stuff like sound missing due to no OSS support anymore, but you can fix it by installing a OSS backend for pulseaudio.

There is also the fact that binary applications do not tap into the distribution package manager, so they can't check if the necessary system libraries are all installed. This ends up as a unfortunate burden to the user...